There is a sense in which people say that a given day “is” an event happening at some time on that day, e.g. “today is the big beach party” even if said party is actually only in the two hours following noon. In that sense, December 24th “is” Christmas Eve, even if said eve is actually, like all eve...

"Spirit Level" already sounds like it should be some kind of mystical weapon or something; like, something that mows down souls or something. The "...of Doom" version just sounds like it got turned to the dark side.

TIL that the average American gets over a billion dongs every year. Because "dong" is the Vietnamese unit of currency and it's so weak against the US dollar that a billion of them is below the mean personal income in the US. A megadong is apparently just $43.07 right now. So for all you gu...

"Grok" is a Martian word. I thought it was Vulcan for "to fully understand and grasp all aspects of" as a transitive verb. 'Must've been been because the example given was "Spock groks." That meaning is correct, but not the language (or source work, I guess). It's from...

I am not familiar with the "NPC" meme, unless it's just the old-timey pen-and-paper RPG slang meaning basically "unimportant person" (the likes of whom The Doctor has never met), but it sounds like there's something more to it than that?

Even if their own paychecks were on the line, which I don't think they are, they can always pass a special bill to address just that, and not address anything else. Though I guess by that reasoning they could also just piecemeal pass special bills to fund specific things as those specific things get...

You know sometimes people do things for reasons other than to make money, right? I mean, those people still need to make money, but sometimes they can make it in other ways and still have time to do other things that they just want to do for their own sake, and don't have to or want to charge for? I...

To be fair, I'm not sure how else making Mexico pay for the wall was ever supposed to be interpreted? Obviously we couldn't just sent them an invoice, so I always figured that "make Mexico pay for it" bit was intended to mean that the US would somehow treat Mexico disfavorably in order to ...

I once freaked out an Australian friend for a moment when he made some comment about black crows, and I replied "Oh yeah, your crows are black down there, like your swans. That's weird." and for a brief shining moment his world was turned upside-down (or would that be right-side-up since h...

I was recently watching some silly Christmas romcom Netflix original movie with my girlfriend, and a bit of incidental music played in a scene that I could swear was the exact same melody to which the lines "Deep in the hundred acre wood / where Christopher Robin Plays / you'll find the enchant...

I'm very happy to report that over the past couple of months, development on Eternal has really taken off, as a couple of fans have chipped in a ton of time and effort to really polish a bunch of things up way beyond my expectations for what I thought I would get done this year. One of them also has...

lots of countries have their own calendar regardless of how much they celebrate Western New Year, most notably China. I was just wondering about this myself earlier today. There isn't one definitive epoch used with the Chinese calendar system, there are at least two different traditional ones and t...

Compare also great 5 -grandparents , meaning great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. Wow. I've never see that expression before (though I have heard someone say "great to the n th "). It really seems to better express the depth/distance of the relationship. I don't think I've ever see...

According to Bob and Doug, the Twelve Days of Christmas are Christmas, Christmas Eve, New Year's, New Year's Eve, Wrestling Boxing Day, and then there's two Saturdays and Sundays in there which makes nine, and the other three are the Mystery Days.

I was in San Diego for Thanksgiving and saw this and wondered if Doctor Who was referencing that of if there's a better-known Tim Shaw? (Or if the joke is just that the alien's name sounds like a mundane Earth name?)

Yeah, a sane, well-designed language would have similar sounds attached to similar meanings (and vice versa). English, having started as a way for Norman men-at-arms (French-speaking) to chat up Saxon barmaids (German-speaking) and cheerfully adopted large chunks of vocabulary from Latin and later ...

This guy is me. I joke that "tech support hates me", because normal run-of-the-mill problems that tech support is equipped to handle, I am also usually equipped to handle, so by the time I call on tech support, it's something really, really bizarre. Either that or I had some kind of total ...

That is awesome and it reminds me of an old New Yorker magazine cover about how New Yorkers see the world, with an extremely detailed New York map in the foreground, like New Jersey in no detail behind it, the rest of the US in sparse detail behind that, and a tiny Japan on the distant horizon. I’ve...

Unspoilered because more general: the whole premise of the show just begs for an explanation of its greater cosmogony. Who created (or how else came to be) the celestial beings like Michael and assigned them to their roles and decided that humans should be judged and rewarded and punished or even co...

Pfhorrest, large universes would be more likely to naturally evolve brains than small universes would be, sure. But they would also be more likely to evolve Boltzmann brains, and more of them. This phrasing doesn't make sense to me. In the sense of "universe" I was using, the classical im...

I think a segue of the conversation got lost. You were talking about how BBs don't have to just pop fully formed out of nothing, but can just arise as a consequent feature of a spontaneous low-energy event, like the one our universe is supposed by some to have come from, but smaller and more probabl...

Yeah as a human I've never felt particularly threatened by the prospect of a single menacing dog (including wolves as dogs here). At most it gets one bite in and then its throat is within reach and it's game over thanks to the power of opposable thumbs that enable such super-moves as grabbing things...

That seems like it re-frames the problem as "big universes* are less likely to spontaneously arise than small ones". If we can also say (as seems intuitively plausible to me at least) that big universes are more likely to develop brains in them than small ones, it seems like the problem go...

I'm saying at that step you quote to imagine that we do that, make it happen on purpose (I hadn't considered gyroscopic effects, not sure if that throws a wrench in all of this). Everything after that is an exploration of what seasons on such a world look like, if you do that. It might be more clear...

Make the planetary tilt 90° (sign really being irrelevant well before this point, if it ever was). At hemispherical mid-summer, no sunset your side of the equator; At hemispherical mid-winter, no sunrise; At each hemispherical equinox, all points of the planet get equal equal day and night (excludi...

(and maybe outside that range too) Most definitely. Some of my friends keep talking about their third leg. I doubt anyone has fewer less than 0 leg, but if you suffer from phantom pain, do you have an imaginary leg? Can't be, because then it would also be a real leg (possibly a negative real leg) f...